Nightmare in Luanda

...Several cars were half-wrapped around palms on the coastal boulevard...

...The white flight had turned Luanda into an eerie shell where nothing worked...

...They are not needed, though, to make this book worth reading...

...Kapuscinski offers no deeper truths or lessons either...

...He writes movingly about his corps of contacts and friends—some who die, some who flee, and others who are left to defy the odds...

...His gripping description of life, however, is weakened by the absence of political context...

...Not knowing was the worst...

...Thetruth beat anything in Evelyn Waugh's journalism classic, Scoop...

...But not all of them stayed...

...The ideologies and goals of the three movements are missing, making it difficult to put the events he so ably describes into perspective...

...Either out of hope or fear, anticipation grew as independence approached that the two pro-Western factions—unita and the Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA)—would launch a final offensive to push out the MPLA...

...Angola became a surreal nightmare, professionally and personally, for even the most hardened correspondents...

...He is keenly aware of the challenge his slim volume faces: "The world contemplates the great spectacle of combat and death, which is difficult for it to imagine in the end, because the image of war is not communicable—not by the pen, or the voice, or the camera...

...InAnotherDayofLifethe widely-respected Polish journalist chronicles the turbulent period that laid the foundation for a war still raging 12 years later...

...As artillery rumbled in the distance, even traffic became manic...

...But this is also a highly personal book, seemingly written by Kapuscinski as much to purge himself of Angola's haunting imagery as to recount a major moment in African history...

...One does not know there were earlier encounters, nor does the author write much about the last...

...Radio broadcasts alternated between issuing triumphant war communiqués and summoning all young men for an 1 lth-hour general mobilization...

...All of them seem tragic...

...Reporters poured in to cover the official end of the Portuguese Empire and the birth of the continent's most disputed black state...

...former African correspondent, CBS News For a foreign correspondent in Africa, covering Angola's independence was the high point of 197 5. It had a little of everything: a grisly civil war complete with superpower agents and arms, a massive exodus of whites surrendering after the longest colonial presence (500 years) on the continent, and an economic collapse in a gloriously lush nation rich with diamonds, oil and coffee...

...In sparse prose Kapuscinski also recreates the tension in Luanda, the pastel-pretty capital that until just months earlier had been known as the Rio de Janeiro of Africa...

...Food was scarce, and too many drank too much beer because often there was no water to counter the sapping humidity...

...To others it is pages in a book, pictures on a screen, nothing more...

...Roughly 10,000 died in the civil war in the year before independence, more than had been killed in the preceding 13-year war of liberation against the Portuguese...

...War is a reality only to those stuck in its bloody, dreadful, filthy insides...

...The war's "frontlines" were amorphous and ever-changing, as was the status of the three rival factions battling for control of the capital, and thus official recognition, on the eve of independence...

...Ryszard Kapuscinski was one of those who stayed...

...Shoddily-clad, nervous guerrillas of the Marxist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) ran late night dragnets of homes and hotels in search of rivals and spies...

...one seemed to have flown into a billboard...

...And at the end he abuses the reader by mentioning his final session with its leader Agostinho Neto, the melancholic poet and Angola's first President...

...Reviewed by Robin Wright Senior associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...

...On a continent long troubled by ethnic and territorial disputes, conflict is so often haphazard and brutal...

...Another Day of Life is about the nature of modern warfare in the Third World, and its basic lines could have been written, unfortunately, about too many other places...

...He accepts the singular legitimacy of the MPL A, almost dismissing the fact that an estimated 20,000 Cuban troops are to this day pivotal to the Popular Mo vement's supremacy...

...Rumor exhausted everyone, plucked at nerves, took away the capacity to think," Kapuscinski writes...

...His portrait of a desperate nation is accurate and telling—and not limited to Angola...